Last week while I was in Kuajok and my phone didn’t work, I had some time to think. I was remembering another trip I took months ago to Rumbek and a specific conversation I had there with a Dinka man there about a conflict between two tribes of the Dinka ethnic group in Lakes State. He was describing the conflict dynamics and I asked him what he thought it would take for the two sides to make peace.
He looked at me quizzically for a second and then burst out laughing.
“Peace! This thing will never happen. Fighting is our tradition!”
Sigh. There are days I just want to pack my bags.
But you know, I am glad we had this conversation and glad that I have had time to reflect on it, because it taught me something really valuable. Not everyone wants peace.
Of course, I had understood before that there are plenty of people who benefit from conflict, like military leaders or politicians who gain power from it or war profiteers, but I guess I just always assumed that the majority of people in a community, the real grassroots base of the warring parties, would want peace. They may not be willing to make the compromises and sacrifices necessary to achieve it, but they should want peace, at least in theory. Right?
But I learned something in Rumbek that really blew my mind. Some people just like to fight. They may not be benefiting from the conflict in any way, they may even be suffering from it, but hating another group and practicing aggression, somewhere along the line insidiously ingrained itself as an accepted (dare I say even beloved?) part of the culture. Of course this does not represent every Dinka person’s attitude toward conflict, not by a long shot. But I am slowly being forced to learn that it is true for some. And that is a tough, tough thing to cure.
-Stephanie
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